July 30, 1898: Car Ads Get Rolling

1898: The Winton Motor Carriage Company places a magazine advertisement cajoling readers to “dispense with a horse.” It’s the earliest known automobile ad.

Car advertisements are looked upon by most people as being about as enjoyable as buying a car from a used car salesman. You might think that advertising for a car is a 20th-century sort of development, something that happened round about the creation of Howdy Doody or perhaps in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post, circa 1931.

You would, of course, be wrong. The very first auto advertisement appeared in 1898. We’ve been dealing with these things for more than a century.

To show you how much times have changed, the very first advertisement for an automobile was placed in, of all places, Scientific American. Yes, the very same Scientific American that would eventually detail the work of Einstein and Fermi, and feature stories of Gary Kasparov’s thoughts on chess-playing computers: That Scientific American saw fit to run the very first auto ad.

The Winton Motor Carriage ad first appeared in the July 30, 1898, issue. Alexander Winton was a Scottish-immigrant bicycle maker who switched to building cars in 1896 and had the world’s largest auto factory by 1900.

No, you won’t see many Wintons running around these days. Winton stopped producing cars in 1924 and started making stationary engines. The firm was bought by General Motors in 1930 and became part of the Electro-Motive Corporation, still in business today.

Did Scientific American and Winton Motor Carriage know what they were setting in motion? Did they know that far too soon we would be assaulted by the likes of Cal Worthington and Jerry’s Cherries? A world where there’s no such thing as “the soft sell” and you feel like you got away fairly clean after paying only 2 percent more than list?

Most assuredly not. Scottish emigrant Alexander Winton simply wanted you to “save the expense, care and anxiety of keeping” a horse. Instead you could drop a mere $1,000 on his car.

That’s about $26,800 in today’s money, compared to Henry Ford’s list price of $825 for the 1908 Model T: about $19,900 in current currency.

The advertisement must have worked, because Robert Allison of Port Carbon, Pennsylvania, bought a Winton after seeing the ad in Scientific American. Later that year Winton sold a staggering 21 more vehicles, including one to James Ward Packard. Yes, the same Packard who went on to found his own car company.

So the next time you hurriedly reach for the mute button on your remote, or grimace at the blaring full-page ad for the used car dealer down the street, remember that it all started with the Winton Motor Carriage Company and Scientific American.